Life at the turn of the century in the lumber camps of the Mississippi Delta, as recalled by a woman pioneer who cooked for hundreds; raised a family; and, with humor and courage, overcame a host of daunting obstacles. Written on scraps of paper in the 1930's at the request of journalist Helen Dick Davis, who edited the manuscript, Mary Hamilton's autobiography was rejected by publishers who felt that the memoirs of a pioneering woman were of no interest. Fortunately, times have changed, and we can now appreciate this remarkable tale of a woman with little formal schooling but tremendous spirit and an intuitive wisdom. Raised in the wild country of Arkansas, Hamilton met her husband, the mysterious Englishman Frank Hamilton, at the boardinghouse she helped her widowed mother run. When her dying mother made her promise to marry Frank and to raise her younger brother and sister, Mary agreed—but ``to be honest, I admired him but I did not love him.'' Over the years, admiration turned to love, but Frank—who hinted at a distinguished background—never fully took Mary into his confidence; he also drank when under pressure, and, in the resulting binges, squandered the money Mary had saved. Her life was filled with work—she did everything from baking 115 loaves of bread a day to milking cows; with hardships—floods that destroyed her home in the camps, as well as a series of financial set-backs that ended her dream of having her own house; and with death—four of her nine children died in early childhood. Courageous, never self-pitying, Mary was quick to note the help of loyal friends; the loving support of her children; and the natural beauty of the Delta in which she lived. A salutary reminder of just what those too-often unremembered women did in opening up this country. A splendid and long overdue addition to the pioneering canon.
Pub Date: Oct. 31, 1992
ISBN: 0-87805-579-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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